Intolerance In `Rainbow Nation'

January 16, 2001|By Paul Salopek, Tribune Foreign Correspondent.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Rasta never expected the horrors that would befall him. That's why, at first, he didn't run away.

The frenzied crowd, witnesses say, materialized without warning on the dusty streets of Dunoon, a dense checkerboard of shacks and public housing tucked in the outskirts of this beautiful coastal city. Armed with clubs and knives and chanting, "Kill the foreigners!" the mob converged on Rasta's small hair-dressing salon.

The Nigerian barber, an easygoing Rastafarian known to neighbors only by his nickname, walked trustingly out to confront the throng. They shouted him down. And then they began to pummel him.

They struck him with axes, fracturing his skull in two places. They stabbed him in the back. They bludgeoned his face so hard his jaw cracked, shattering most of his teeth. Then, leaving him for dead, the rabble scattered through the neighborhood to ransack the homes and businesses of other African immigrants.

Almost seven years after South Africa dumped apartheid, one of the most egregious systems of racist politics the past century had ever seen, a worrying new brand of intolerance is bubbling to the surface in Africa's self-proclaimed "rainbow nation."

Stoked by an unprecedented influx of immigrants from elsewhere in Africa, hate crimes against makwerekwere--as outsiders are sometimes called here--are on the rise and increasingly violent.

"This was not about xenophobia," insisted George Chadala, a Dunoon community elder who gave a careful tour of the destruction. "It was a public action about fighting crime."

Poking through the singularly pathetic wreckage of a shantytown riot--scraps of linoleum tossed on the sand, grimy plastic water jugs, bits of corrugated asbestos roofing--he declared that South Africans actually love their brothers and sisters from Namibia, Angola and Nigeria who lately have been living here.

But certain foreigners are criminals, he said. Most of the outsiders possess illegal guns. And, he asserted,they can be corrupt, bribing their way into scarce public housing meant for South African citizens.

As for the public beating of the Nigerian barber, Chadala conceded that "the protest against crime got out of control."

In recent years, scores of anti-immigrant abuses have been logged by human-rights groups.

Three foreign hawkers were pushed out of a train and killed; others died in street battles with local vendors in Johannesburg, the country's financial center; and at least five immigrants from French-speaking Africa were killed in drive-by shootings that police say may be the work of a xenophobic serial killer.

The violence in Dunoon is just the latest outburst of anti-immigrant fury. More than 300 immigrants from Angola, Namibia and Nigeria, many of them longtime residents of South Africa, were chased from the township 11 days ago by rampaging groups of local men after a dispute at a tavern escalated into open war.

One South African was killed and dozens on all sides were injured in the days of rage that followed.

Sensitive to charges of xenophobia, politicians with South Africa's ruling African National Congress, former President Nelson Mandela's party of inclusiveness, have taken great pains to attribute the rampage to petty crime.

"I want to make it clear: It's not an issue of us against so-called refugees or foreigners," said Linda Isaacs, a leader of the ANC in Dunoon's city ward. "That is all a media exaggeration. This is an issue of criminal elements. If there is any racism involved, it's about the police not doing [their] job by properly patrolling poor black settlements."

But even a few minutes' walk in the sun-blasted streets of Dunoon and its dusty constellation of shack communities revealed a chasm of anger and fear that appears to be growing among many impoverished black South Africans and the swelling ranks of outsiders who they say are competing for their jobs, their public benefits such as housing, and even "our women."

All of the smashed buildings in Dunoon and neighboring shantytowns belonged to foreigners. A few local residents, sympathetic to the immigrants' plight, said that young toughs went after anyone who "looked too black."

Exceptionally dark skin or the inability to speak a local language, such as Xhosa or Zulu, marked strangers as makwerekweres, they said. At least one dark-skinned South African man had to run for his life once the rioting broke out.

Scores of Dunoon's foreign residents, meanwhile, took refuge at local police stations, where they camped out for protection.

"They hate us simply because we work harder than they do and are more successful in business," said Lucas Mwashekele, a Namibian whose tavern was torn down in the mayhem. "Some of us are so terrified we want to go back home, even to countries in war."